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2 responses to “real world vs fictional world”

I would say the film is a fiction. Though it’s set against a backdrop of real events, relies, in fact, on those events to throw its emotional punch, it’s no more a true story than any other work of fiction.

In most works of literature, there’s so much in the network that gets taken for granted that it’s hardly even funny. That we live on a planet called earth, and so do these characters. That they don’t fly off into space due to the earth’s gravity, just as we don’t. That they live in a breathable atmosphere, just as we (mostly) do. That a chair in the diegetic space is the same thing as a chair in OUR diegetic space.

Just because the Civil War happened doesn’t make the story of a plantation owning family’s descent from its antebellum heyday a true story; it’s still a fiction, no matter how many layers of truth may compose that fiction.